kalmar wrote:
Err umm sorry, but NO.
Pissing on chips mode engaged.
There's no such thing as an LED with a filament, for a start. LEDs are Light Emitting Diodes; p-n junctions. Alienware do not make LEDs and certainly didn't design them.
The ones in this PC were R&D'd by Alienware. They don't look anything like the ones you have linked to. They have 4 legs, and are about 1/2 the size of a regular LED. They're also fitted to PCBs and not user changable. Again, the entire PCB and LEDs on it were R&D'd by Alienware.
I hear what you're saying, but these aren't normal LEDS. Just the same as a DB9 Aston Martin doesn't use normal parts.
Here, this is the front LED board from an Alienware.
And here is the proprietory ELC (electronic lighting controller) that goes into the daughterboard.
Both of which are soley unique to them because they researched and developed both.
kalmar wrote:
RGB LEDs are widely available. I remember when they first became available in fact, approximately 22 years ago, when I bought one for £15 and built a circuit that was in a magazine to make it slowly cycle through all the colours of the spectrum (infinity different colours, in fact, as it was an analogue circuit). This was highly impressive at the time.
But now they are found in everything from Samsung mobile phones to cheap LED tat to affix to chavvy cars, to the spotlights which illuminate the millennium bridge in Newcastle.
Here's one in a catalogue if you don't believe me:
http://uk.farnell.com/kingbright/lf-5wa ... dp/1168585That's cool. And yes, Alienware do charge the earth for them. But then R&D doesn't come cheap and as with any specialty product you pay for it one way or another.
kalmar wrote:
So I'm sorry but you're completely being taken for a ride with all this bling nonsense. You can spend your money how you like but if you're mainly doing it to boast about how much the bits you own sold for, you may as well go the whole hog and buy the gold-plated, diamond encrusted Nokia phone for £50,000. Then I'd be impressed.
Mass-produced tacky PC cases with multi-coloured lighting and a dishonest sales pitch? Not so much.
Well it's pretty hard to compare an Alienware with another case until you've owned one. Also a good understanding of why their PCs cost so much is a bonus.
A friend of mine just phoned me and said he had specced a system on there. But, it cost £350 more than one he had specced elsewhere. I asked him to link me to both, the Alienware and the Yoyotech.
Firstly the Alienware had one of these in it.
http://www.yoyotech.co.uk/asus-rampage- ... 71483.htmlAnd the yoyo had a cheap POS. Then we got to PSU. The yoyo had a 650w psu, the Alienware a 1kw. And it just went on. In the end the Alienware actually seemed like good value and was about £200 more than building one specced the same himself. However, that didn't include their 24/7 free phone support, didn't inc any peripherals (no kb, no mouse nothing) and didn't come built half as well as an Alienware. So he ordered the Alienware.
There's a reason a company can stay in business for 10 years and beat Dell at their own game (XPS range. has now been discontinued) and it's not through ripping people off. They must be doing something right. Infact, they were doing so well the only way Dell could beat them was to buy them.